bargain

Best tech gifts for under $50

Gadgets make great gifts--for the recipients, at least. For the gift giver, however, tech products often mean a sizable bite out of the wallet. It's great to get an iPad--it's decidedly less enticing to pay for one.

Thankfully, there are some great tech gifts you can buy at far more reasonable prices--less than $50, to be precise.

We've scoured the Internet to find 10 worthy gifts that will cost you less than a Ulysses S. Grant. The list includes MP3 players, headphones, one great game for each major game console, and--our current favorite video streamer--the Roku LT (pictured above).

Got a favorite bargain gift that we skipped over? Let us know your suggestion in the comments.

… Read more

Prepare for Black Friday with Android

Less than two weeks from now, thousands, if not millions, of us will once again gear up for yet another annual retail scramble.

Black Friday kicks off shopping for the holiday season and is one of the busiest events for most major retailers. We're here to offer some tools to help you take advantage of the many deals across different stores and get the most out of this hectic day. All you'll need is some light planning, caffeine, and an Android phone to run some handy apps.

Behind every successful shopping story lies a well-thought-out master plan. Researching … Read more

Find local deals with 8coupons for iOS

Oh, 8coupons, where were you last night when I stopped for dinner at Ruby Tuesday? With about three taps of my iPhone's screen, I could have saved 15 percent on my entire bill!

I won't make that mistake again. This new app serves up local deals from thousands of sources, showing them on a map or in a big searchable list. For serious bargain-hunters, it's an essential mobile companion.

But an imperfect one. For starters, you're limited to deals in your immediate area--unless you manually scroll the map to another location. There's no way to load up the deals for someplace you might be heading, which would be helpful for, say, determining ahead of time where you want to have dinner.

What's more, many of the deals I found required printed coupons, and the app offers no means for printing them. Indeed, in many cases 8coupons merely routes you to a Web page listing the deal, one that's not formatted for mobile viewing--and certainly not for mobile printing. That's a pretty major limitation.… Read more

Savvy shopping

Shop Savvy Premium Barcode Scanner is certainly not the only bar code reader in the iTunes App Store, but it offers some unique features to make it a handy shopping companion when checking prices. Like other apps in the category, ShopSavvy lets you use your iPhone camera to "scan" a bar code then view the item and prices from various locations. The interface is set up to be as simple as possible, but it offers nice touches such as the ability to initiate a scan by swiping upward on the product display screen.

After a bar code scan, … Read more

The rise of the 99-cent Kindle e-book

Not long ago I did a story about how e-book piracy was accelerating and that publishers should be concerned. But while piracy is certainly an issue, there's something else lurking out there that may be a bigger problem: e-book price erosion. Or put another way, the blogification of the book industry.

Now, I know what you're saying: that's great news. These publishers have been gouging us with ridiculous pricing for digital files that cost next to nothing to produce (in terms of material costs) and finally we're starting to see lots of deals out there. But … Read more

Five 'hot' bargain TVs among CNET readers

When it comes to TVs, everybody likes to know what CNET--and in particular, senior editor David Katzmaier--thinks are the best models. That's why we have top products lists and why a lot of people tend to check out the sets on those lists. But then there's a whole group of TVs David doesn't get a chance to review that are popular with readers and show up high in CNET traffic reports.

Those models usually are more entry-level sets that manufacturers tend to avoid sending to us because they know we grade pretty tough and it's not … Read more

Kindle forces budget e-reader price chops

When it comes to e-readers these days, most of the action here in the U.S. seems to be concentrated around the Kindle, Nook, and iPad. But every week or so, we'll notice a traffic spike on CNET for an e-reader that isn't from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Inevitably, this is due to a special discount that some store is running on the product or perhaps even an appearance in a Best Buy circular.

That discount price is usually pretty attractive--and has to be--to compete with the Kindle with Wi-Fi at $139 and the Nook Wi-Fi at $… Read more

Westinghouse touts its $899 'value' 46-inch LED TV

At CES, companies like to roll out new TV technologies and higher-end sets. But Westinghouse is doing something different. It's talking up the value of its LED TV lineup, highlighting the 46-inch LD-4655 that hits stores later this month for a suggested retail price of $899.

The 1080P LCD measures just over 2 inches thick and has a high-gloss, black bezel and weighs 38 pounds. In terms of specs, you're not looking at anything fancy: a 120Hz refresh rate, 6.5ms response time, and LED backlighting, which helps make the set more energy efficient.

We can't say … Read more

The year's best bargain phones (2010 roundup)

Price is important for a large swath of the cell-phone-buying public. But so are call quality, hardware and software features, and style.

That perfect balance between a great price and satisfying everything else is rare, and also subjective. Nevertheless, we've rounded up the nine cell phones and smartphones that caused our deal hounds the most excitement in 2010.

This wasn't entirely easy. There have been some incredible values this past year, especially from the summer onward. Our top choices range from a favorite texting phone for teens to two smartphones priced low enough to wonder if the carrier … Read more